Category Archives: Feminist Friday

So I’m sneaking this one in at the eleventh hour, which is shameful for a variety of reasons, but mostly because I’m the one who suggested the Women on Television topic in the first place! Fifteen hours and counting until the link expires, but I can knock it out pretty quick. After all, I’ve been semi-composing this post in my head for almost an entire week.

I’ve started a blog to list strategies skeptics can employ to increase the number of women within the ranks. Each day I will post one recommendation that will hopefully provide insight into a woman’s experience within the skeptical movement and a suggestion for a behavior (either to engage in or refrain from) that skeptics can perform if they want more women working for their cause. I have found that it’s always easier to have a productive discussion if it is limited in scope, which my blog is. If all goes according to plan, it will be a space in which people can discuss a woman’s experience without hyperbole and derailment, and maybe open a few minds. I welcome comment and suggestions, especially from people who have experience recruiting members to organizations.

So here I am with a self-imposed deadline of one hour and I desire to knock out some post on Feminist Friday instead of on Sunday, and because I’ve been caught up in “ElevatorGate” (Team Rebecca!), it seems like a good topic. But I don’t want to get into this whole big thing where I explain the situation again, or where I list my reasons for joining Team Rebecca (as far as I know, there’s not a real Team Rebecca–I’m just saying that), but I have spotted a point of confusion amongst the chatter and diatribes, and I want to clarify it. The skeptic and atheist communities are involved in a conversation that includes a description of said communities as sexist. It is distressing to many people within the communities that sexism is a possibility, including people on the receiving end of sexism and people who don’t want to think that their preferred behaviors are sexist even if they don’t intend them to be. The dialogue has included a lot of goofy assertions, too, and one whine in particular is repeated often:

So now feminists are telling men that it’s sexist to ask women out on dates. (Wah is unstated but implied.)

No, feminists are not telling men that it’s sexist to ask women on dates. It’s not sexist to ask women on dates. Find out why below!

Yes, I’m Going Rogue. The Transatlantic Blonde is on vacation, and without a deadline I got behind. True, it’s Sunday, but “Feminist Sunday” lacks a certain panache. Besides, I didn’t really have a post topic specific enough to write about until basically today, and I was tired of glurging all over the computer. And then a few things that have been brewing in the skepticism movement about sexism and feminism bubbled to a pitch heated enough for me to actually sign in and comment on the Pharyngula blog and so I realized I did have some simple points to make about men and women and behavior in general.

Can't Help Being Creepy

At the end of this post is the wordy explanation for what convoluted path through the Internet inspired me to write today. Long story short, I am interested today in the simultaneous denial and justification of creepy behavior of men towards women, which is a topic I feel lends itself towards a numbered list.

Feminist Friday, Folks! You know you want it. The week is themeless, and because I suck at themes, and because I finally nixed one that was going to be a scathing expose’ until I did a minimal amount of research and discovered I really had no case, I’m going to follow Transatlantic Blonde’s lead and write about “Modern Feminism” just like she did, but with a twist. I’m all about the twist. It’s why you thirty readers keep coming back to this blog every third day.

And because I’m not entirely confident that you’ll follow me across the jump just on me being mysterious, I’ll give you the twist now. My piece on “Modern Feminism” is inspired by an anonymously published text from 1913, The Woman with Empty Hands. It’s an explanation of how the author, identified as Marion Hamilton Carter, found herself aligned with the Suffragist movement in the United States. It’s available in its entirety online, and it would take you all of thirty minutes to read, if that. It’s shocking, really, how modern it sounds, and how applicable it seems to today’s feminism.

It’s Feminist Friday again, and the Transatlantic Blonde’s theme for the week was Violence Against Women. I don’t really know what to say about violence against women that wouldn’t have been said already by someone with more information, insight, and sensitivity than me, but that’s never stopped me from writing before. So like all dutiful writers I look to my life for inspiration. We’ve been watching The Wire, Season 2, which opens with thirteen dead women in a shipping container bound for the brothels and strip clubs of the Eastern Seaboard. We haven’t seen the whole season yet or even talked to a woman who survived a trip in a shipping container, but I’m suspecting that we’re going to meet one and learn that she was coerced somehow into this position.

Supplying sex workers to meet international demand is not the only motivation for human trafficking, of course (but it makes up 79% of the problem, according to the UN source linked to below), but it’s the one I’m going to focus on right now. It’s the topic that keeps coming up in my life, from the Lifetime Network Human Trafficking miniseries to (light & cursory) research I did on Japan’s immigration issues to the FOX TV show Dollhouse, to a forum thread I participated in a long time ago, to this call for blogs about violence against women. I’d already shot my proverbial wad (to ironically use a sexual term) by posting the “Sexual Assault Prevention Tips” graphic last week, so here we are.

Today’s topic is about raising children to be feminist. It’s a topic I have pondered for a long time, and something I’ve tried to do consciously for a good portion of their short little lives. I haven’t read any books about it, and I haven’t seen any results–Fella is only five and in kindergarten; Filly is only four and in preschool, and although they’ve certain both adopted the traditional gender roles as far as appearances go (she wants to be a ballerina when she grows up; he wants to be a snake wrangler), they are still young enough that the power imbalances that anger them the most have to do with what crazy-ass privileges adults get that they’re not allowed to have. I haven’t yet seen either one frustrated by what boys and girls are supposed to do (or not supposed to do). Maybe it’s just their ages so far working in my favor. Maybe my experiment is garnering results. Maybe I have no business calling it an experiment with no data collection and no control groups and too many variables. Maybe you’re curious about what I’m trying to do anyway. Here’s a handy list:

1. I refer to “kids” and “children” as often as possible, instead of referring to “boys” and “girls.”
2. No means no, no matter who you are.
3. I try to preempt body shame.
4. I’ve given my son an “out” to use with friends.

The Transatlantic Blonde is taking a break from Feminist Friday this week, but I don’t dare lest I lose the swing of things altogether. So I’m going it alone! The benefit of that is that I don’t have to try (with variable success) to piece together an extended, coherent thought. What you’re getting today, then, is a collection of loosely affiliated blurbs–with pictures!–that I have a sneaking suspicion most people would rather read anyway. What you’re not getting, however, is anything particularly newsworthy or insightful.

1. Baby Storm Stocker
For crying out loud, people, nobody is raising any genderless baby. The parents aren’t “picking” the kid’s gender any more than any other parent has picked any other kid’s gender. The kid is going to grow up in a family and in a community where there are lots of males and females, and whatever gender the kid has already been born will eventually show itself and the kid will have a name for it, and in the meantime it’s certainly not your business what the shape of the baby’s genitals are, and if the parents aren’t telling you and you are getting mad about it, they still aren’t the ones with a problem. So there.

It’s Feminist Friday, kids! This week’s topic, set for us by our hostess at the Transatlantic Blonde blog, is Gender Roles. And I’m not sure if this post is even mostly about Pat, or if it contains much real polemics at all, or if I am even using the word “polemics” correctly, but damn it makes a good title. So let’s go with it, shall we?

This is a link to the Feminist Friday hosting blog. Click it.

Gender roles is serious business. For all the talk you hear about how gender doesn’t matter and the right person for the job, and we’re all friends, aren’t we, people really, really don’t like to not know whether to treat a person as male or female. First case in point:

Like all blog posts I write, this once has a meandering and seemingly irrelevant introductory paragraph.

After mastering Facebook and losing interest in some of the online discussion boards I’d been frequenting (SOME, friends–just SOME), I decided to give Twitter a try. It hasn’t really been a success, or else maybe I’m impatient, or I don’t know what, but those nebulous dreams I had for it are not being realized. Nonetheless, I’ve had some fine fun and learned things I’ve never expected to learn from people I don’t even know.

This is a link to the Feminist Friday hosting blog. Click it.

One of those things is Feminist Friday at the Transatlantic Blonde blog. I know a person from a website who retweeted an announcement, and it came at this time in my life when I’ve hit my lifetime maximum of frequenting online spaces in which people 1) aren’t aware of how insidious and pervasive sexism is in the culture AND 2) get angry when you explain how it can manifest in things they do and say. (The first group don’t bother me; it’s the second group that wear me out.) No solitary interest of mine that can only be enjoyed within an Internet community–no matter how important the community claims to be–is worth spending time with people who only respect me so long as I maintain their status quo. To paraphrase Grouch Marx, I don’t want to belong to any club that will shit on people like me. Life’s too short, you know?